Nature and the University of California are in a negotiation that at the moment looks more like a game of chicken. Norman Oder has a very interesting post about it at Library Journal. “UC says it currently pays $4,465 per NPG [Nature Publishing Group] journal, while the proposed cost for 2011 is $17,479. Nature responds that the proposed cost per download represents a very good value.” Nature contends that the current pricing represents and overly-generous discount. Further, Nature points to a per-download cost of $0.56 under the new prices. Keith Yamamoto, a professor and executive vice dean at the University of California San Francisco, is threatening to organize a UC boycott of Nature titles.

It’s all very complex and I don’t claim to understand it. But it is yet one more indication that this system is very broken.

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The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review is going open access:

…we’ve refined our author agreement (already very liberal) to explicitly ensure that authors retain their copyrights, and we’re making our agreement public on our website. At the same time, we’re also embracing open publication, formally putting our articles under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial No-Derivatives license, and allowing our authors to distribute themselves under even more liberal licenses if they so choose.

Yay!

[Tags: open_access journals law_journals everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Peter Suber gave a terrific talk last week, hosted by the Berkman Center. Afterwards, I sat down with him for a podcast on the politics around open access.

[Tags: peter_suber open_access podcasts knowledge libraries journals publishing ]

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